Thanks for all the online and offline responses. A quick summary of where I am with this project, and the various solutions offered.

Piazza–Piazza will integrate with our LMS via LTI and we do have it. As far as I can tell, after some initial enthusiasm for it a few years ago, nobody here has been using. Thus, I cannot speak to the spam issue that Nina raised. Still, I looked at it and do not see any vote up/down option on it. It is structured more as a Q & A organizer. There is an option for professors to rate an answer as good or bad, but that it is different from a popular vote.

WordPress Theme or Plugin–I found a couple of vote up/down WordPress solutions. However, as far as I can tell, none are actively maintained. The most recent I saw is a couple of years old.

Google Moderator–This looks like it may have been just what we want, but Google retired the program last year. Currently you just get the message, “We’ve retired Google Moderator. The site is no longer available in any form, but you can get to data from past Moderator series through our “Download your Data” tool.

Brightspace–May work for those that have it, but we do not.

Canvas–Perhaps another area where it beats Moodle. However, we do not have it and I’m not sure we want to get it at this time.

Drupal–This might work! I did not see an up/down vote option with http://skill-tree.org, but it seems there are a few options. I’m looking into this further.
Commercial options–I got suggestions for commercial software such as http://crowdicity.com and https://www.uservoice.com/. Both seem like they could work, but I don’t know if we have a budget for this.

FYI, I got more detail from the professor about the project. I learned he is not looking for a classroom solution. He is looking to lead a potentially sensitive and controversial campus-wise conversation. Thus, this might not be the best place to have posted. Still, maybe someone else on the list will also find this useful.

16 Startups Poised to Disrupt the Education Market

Colleges and universities are facing new competition for customers–students and their parents–from startups delivering similar goods (knowledge, credentials, prestige) more affordably and efficiently. Here’s a rundown of some of those startups.

1. Rafter

Using cloud-based e-textbooks and course materials, Rafter helps campus bookstores digitize their offerings and keep their prices low, allowing them to regain the market share they were losing to other stores and course-materials marketplaces.

2. Piazza

Piazza is an online study room where students can anonymously ask questions to teachers and other students. The best answers get pushed to the top through repeated user endorsement.

3. InsideTrack

As do the above two companies, InsideTrack sells its services to universities. It provides highly personalized coaching to students and it helps colleges assess whether their technology and processes are equipped to measure student progress. nsideTrack recently announced a partnership with Chegg, through which it will provide its coaching services directly to students.

4. USEED

If you attended a four-year school, then you know the feeling of receiving relentless requests for alumni donations. USEED is like Kickstarter for school fundraising:

9. The UnCollege Movement

10. Udacity

Founded by Stanford computer science professor Sebastian Thrun, Udacity creates online classes through which companies can train employees. AT&T, for example, paid Udacity $3 million to develop a series of courses, according to The Wall Street Journal.

11. Coursera

12. EdX

In a nonprofit joint venture, MIT and Harvard created their own organization offering free online courses from top universities. Several other schools now offer their courses through EdX, including Berkeley, Georgetown, and the University of Texas system.

13. Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative

CMU’s OLI is another example of a nonprofit startup founded by a school to ward off its own potential disruption.

14. Saylor.org

Founder Michael Saylor has been musing on how technology can scale education since he himself was an undergrad at MIT in the early ’80s. Anyone, anywhere, can take courses on Saylor.org for free.

15. Open Badges

Founded by Mozilla, Open Badges is an attempt to establish “a new online standard to recognize and verify learning.”

16. Accredible

Calling itself the “future of certificate management,” Accredible is the company that provides certification services for several of the online schools on this list, including Saylor.org and Udacity.

The advent of Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs and wikis offered viable alternative to the commercial CMS. Further, open source products such as Drupal and Sakai posed additional competition to commercial CRS.

Last but not least, with the advent of cloud computing, a new generation of products are competing with BB and D2L